Two months ago, AT&T petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to plan for the retirement of traditional phone networks and transition to what AT&T sees as an inevitability: the all-IP telco.

AT&T had been discussing the transition internally, spurred on by the FCC's own suggestion that the Public Switched Telephone Network might be ripe for death somewhere around 2018. "This telephone network we've grown up with is now an obsolete platform, or at least a rapidly obsolescing platform," Hank Hultquist, VP of AT&T's federal regulatory division, said today. "It will not be sustainable for the indefinite future. Nobody's making this network technology anymore. It's become more and more difficult to find spare parts for it. And it's becoming more and more difficult to find trained technicians and engineers to work on it."

Hultquist was speaking as part of a Consumer Electronics Show panel titled "Introducing the All-IP Telco." The panel was moderated by Daniel Berninger, founder of a startup called VCXC (the Voice Communication Exchange Committee) devoted to speeding the transition to all-IP networks.

Although going all-IP signals the death of traditional telephone networks, Hultquist believes Internet Protocol-based networks will give voice calls a higher quality and greater importance. He looks forward to the integration of voice throughout the Web, something that is already happening with the likes of Skype on Facebook and Google Hangouts.

"Voice is the most efficient way to communicate," he said. "We have had the same voice service for 80 years. The voice quality you get when you make a call on the iPhone today is the same voice quality Bell Laboratories thought you should have in 1933. Shift forward 80 years, we're still using the same frequency response, 300 to 3300Hz." The human voice can make sounds at frequencies up to 20,000Hz.

When everything is IP, the telecom industries and IT industries will basically become one and the same, Berninger said. It'll be important to make the transition while preserving what's good about traditional phone networks, such as reliability and 911 services, he noted. In doing so, companies like AT&T will shed lots of complexity and potentially save a ton of money. AT&T's network services and content delivery would all be delivered using the same technology.

Obviously, an all-IP network lacks any traditional circuit switching. "If you take a central office, pull out all the TDM (time-division multiplexing) equipment, and put in all IP equipment, guess what happens? The central office disappears," Berninger said. "The first thing the telcos get is a whole lot of free real estate. … It's going to be a really great thing for AT&T. BT made a lot of money when they switched over to IP."

The switch to all-IP telcos will be far more complex than the switch to all-digital television, Hultquist said. "TV was one service. Phone companies like AT&T have thousands of services based on this legacy technology," he said. Why thousands? Hultquist notes that when you order traditional phone service, you choose from "a dizzying array of diff combinations of features: With voicemail, with caller ID, without caller ID, with various kinds of dialing capabilities."

Each different combination represents a service, or USOC (Universal Service Ordering Code), in the phone companies' parlance. Merging all of these into fewer IP services will help make service providers more efficient.

Of course, many customers have already switched to all-IP networks themselves, ditching landlines for cell phones and VoIP services. "We do believe there are significant opportunities here for expense savings," Hultquist said, noting that the numbers of Americans with landlines have dwindled. "There are some cost savings opportunities here and it's a good thing because the base of customers supporting that platform is so much smaller now than it was ten years ago."

In AT&T's aforementioned petition to the FCC, the company suggests some very preliminary steps. This would include in certain cities or regions to retire TDM equipment completely and deliver phone services using the Internet Protocol. Testing all-IP networks at a small scale may help identify potential technological roadblocks. The trials would not be exclusive to AT&T—any phone company could participate. The FCC is taking public comments on AT&T's proposal.

Less government interference, please

Of course, AT&T is also hoping for a more friendly regulatory environment (that is, a less extensive regulatory environment) as part of the IP transition.

"AT&T believes that this regulatory experiment will show that conventional public-utility style regulation is no longer necessary or appropriate in the emerging all-IP ecosystem," AT&T wrote in its petition to the FCC. "Monopoly-era regulatory obligations" aren't justified in the competitive marketplace known as the Internet, the company said.

The CES panelists repeatedly stated that today, telecom is a regulated industry while the Internet essentially is not—and they want to keep it that way.

Daniel Brenner, a newly appointed Los Angeles County Superior Court judge who was previously an attorney specializing on FCC policy and regulatory matters, expressed glee that a recent UN meeting did not result in the International Telecommunications Union "taking over" the Internet. Brenner says things like network neutrality should also die at the US level.

"If we oppose Internet regulation at the international level because it doesn't make sense, we need to make sure Internet regulation in the US does makes sense," Brenner said. "Network neutrality was very controversial. And really for many of us who didn't think that was a wise decision, it's because you needed market failure, something going on in a market that causes the regulator to come in. That hadn't really been demonstrated to the minds of many of us in the net neutrality context. Don't make it worse by regulating."

If AT&T gets all that it wants with its petition to the FCC, it would have fewer rules to follow in an IP future than it did in its PSTN past. As we reported in November, "Some industry watchers are worried such a move would make an end-run around existing regulations that require a baseline level of phone service under federal law."

One thing everyone can probably agree on is that the shift to all-IP networks is a big one.

"We have 100 years of traditional telecom playing out, colliding with 50 or 60 years of information technology, and the thing that comes out of that collision is an all-IP telco," Berninger said. "In five years we'll know what that looks like. At this point we can just guess. But it's going to be a very big deal."

168 Reader Comments

In Norway the former government telco (privatized in 94 but with the government as a shareholder to this day) the has announced plans to retire the wired phone service completely, and move everyone over to mobile solutions.

Isn't that incredibly dangerous in the case of a power outage?

Best i can tell, they are tired of fixing the last stretch between switches and homes every time a winter storm hits. And we had a particularly strong one a year ago. But even then the mobile network worked, when with power down aceoss the area.

British Telecom (the UK's national phone company). Not spelled out for the same reason you rarely hear about the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.originally a subsidiary of the American Bell Telephone Company, later purchased by the National Cash Register Company which then adopted the name of the new subsidiary.

All these companies are far better known by a nickname or acronym.BTAT&TMa BellNCR

Sometimes naming the company is more confusing than using the abbreviation, after all how many people have heard of that obscure computer manufacturer International Business Machines, Inc. compared to the number who know who IBM is

I hope you mean that it doesn't equal as in IP is superior in every way. Because I have never in my life regularly dealt with an audio system with worse quality than standard copper phone lines. The frequency bandwidth that was standardized back when systems were first being rolled out was specifically chosen because it was the bare minimum needed to reliably understand someone speaking. Every IP based system I've ever used has utterly destroyed standard landlines for clarity.

Nonsense. This is only true if the POTS network is not well maintained. You clearly don't understand the difference between circuit switching and unreliable packet switching. A fully IP based infrastructure implies no QoS guarantees, so you'll sometimes get good service and sometimes bad. The only "solution" is end-to-end over provisioning. However I can understand why copper wire to the home is becoming increasingly less viable, economically.

BTW, IP != digital and Internet != IP. A lot of the existing POTS is already digital. It's only the last connection to the home that's analog copper. Still this could be very feasible if the connection to the home uses IP over a dedicated channel with reserved bandwidth at the link level and similarly routing occurs over dedicated infrastructure. But, I bet that's not what consumers are going to get.

So, I'm not that well versed in the underlying technological pros and cons -- but if AT&T is for it, I'm going to need some convincing that it's not a bad idea for everyone aside from big telcos (a lot of convincing).

And now for the most humorous part of it all: they're already fucked for the transition.

Cable companies got into this business quick to take on telcos. Telcos fired back by taking them on with television service. In the middle of this slapfight, services like Skype and Google Voice became well known.

At this point, I don't think switching all their lines up will net them a sustainable source of revenue. Sure, they'll get an early surge when they take all that copper out of the ground and off of the telephone polls and sell it to the dump, but ideally they should have spit out a baby company for conquering this exact service long ago while they were still fat and getting fatter.

Ok for the uninitiated, here are the reasons for the cost savings. Less equipment with much much higher capacities (hence, customers) at lower operating costs. Savings in power, cooling, space, people maintenance etc. More modern services, XDSL, wireless, virtual private circuits etc. Control over traffic and shifting of traffic in emergencies. Abilities to "Open" up capacities with software controls. BT saved a ton with proper placement of equipment and bulk buying abilities (for 5 years at pre-agreed prices). It effectively changes their business model as a carrier and they can lease spaces for other players under open regulations and also offer their advanced services to their competitor's customers. Its a god-sent solution for those who plan and use the technologies for what it was designed for. Their competitor C&W bet on the wrong horse (strategy) and crumbled ....

As an employee of a company who deals with an ip based phone service for home use I'm honestly worried. The price and quality is definitely there, but it's the reliability tats a factor. Currently my company and others get around many rules and regs for phone by taking the position that the service is for entertainment uses.

We do have battery backups in the modem for 8 hrs but it does no good when the lines use commercial power same as the customer. Another issue is there is often no rush to repair phone service within 24 hrs let alone the same day as most phone users are familiar with.

If they fallow through they need new regulations that apply for more voip services that are sold on their own such as AT&T, Comcast, WOW, Verizon and others are offering to help keep things working while allowing room for services like Vonage who need internet service to work (as in separate subscription) Only then would the old copper lines be truly obsolete.

In Norway the former government telco (privatized in 94 but with the government as a shareholder to this day) the has announced plans to retire the wired phone service completely, and move everyone over to mobile solutions.

Isn't that incredibly dangerous in the case of a power outage?

They tried that in Sweden. Removed copper and gave mobile replacement to everyone. Fortunately people didn't need to wait for a power outage to test if it works, it didn't work even with power supplied.

It's a lot cheaper for telco and once the copper is gone they can stall forever on getting people a replacement that works. Not like the government is going to do anything bad to them for ignoring rules for emergency phone service and all that.

I don't like VoIP and I don't like PSTN. One is an antiquated system and the other is a newer network modeled on an antiquated system. The only part of the old network that still uses the original hardware of the old analog system is the last mile, everything else is upgraded to newer technologies.

The real way to go from here on is pure internet connected devices. No VoIP, no PSTN, just direct connection to the internet everywhere you go and instant connection to everybody that's part of your social group. The real reason they want to drop PSTN is because they can't sell you as many add on services like they can with VoIP and they can't monopolize you without VoIP. If we had devices that simply connected to the internet, we'd have no need to be tied to a local provider and we could choose services for ourselves, even from a competitor. If we wanted caller ID, we'd have an app installed for it. If we wanted textual voice mail, to coin a phrase, "there's an app for that." I think you get the picture.

And there is no one preventing you from doing that, the thing you have to understand is that some service are just impossible to maintain, without centralized management, 911 for example, has that kind of service require location registration or a localization device (which mobile phone can be).

And why wouldn't you want VoIP anyway, what other standardized voice communication protocol are you gonna use if you need to communicate outside your usual circle, you gonna send them an email to install teamspeak and login to your server ? VoIP got the advantage of using an already internationally accepted communication standard, that work on device with a very simple interface.

If VoIP become generalized it would also have the advantage of just been able to switch cellular network into a purely IP network, which would be a huge advantage, has that would mean the cellular network provider and mobile phone would no longer be intrinsically linked, has they would simply become an ISP. And the same go for wired network, has a centralized VoIP management doesn't have to be linked to your ISP.

Basically I am all for it, for it actually hurt big telecom, has that mean we can force them back into simply been network provider instead of the convoluted service provider they have become, has if all communication network are IP based, once you got the connection, you can use the service you want, including not using a centralized VoIP management in your case.

I couldn't help noticing their lack of definition of an "all-ip" network. If they're talking about replacing everything all the way to the wiring and phones in people's homes, this could be a costly mess all around.

I have Comcast for internet and TV. However, I use a PSTN line for phone/fax. I've lost cable and internet access during pretty much every bit of bad weather to hit my area (and I lose internet even when there's not bad weather) but I've never lost phone service. I don't fax often but, when I do, it always works.

As a tech who has spent a lot of time troubleshooting phones and related equipment and wiring, I'd much rather troubleshoot a PSTN line than a VoIP one. It's both easier and cheaper to fix a plain old pots line. I also have no faith in Cisco equipment. I might be biased though, since I'm the one who always gets called to replace broken Cisco equipment. The fact Cisco equipment is needlessly overly complex doesn't help my opinion of them.

I don't feel VoIP has really been done right yet by anyone. At least, no one I have experience with has done it right. It either doesn't work as well as a PSTN line or it's way over priced and still falls short. I suppose at least part of the blame falls on the fact that the internet as a whole just isn't reliable. That whole "speeds not guaranteed" BS (or guaranteed up-time for that matter) being a large factor there. Maybe, someone out there knows a service that is reliable and you can actually use all your old analog equipment with (like a fax machine). However, I don't know of any (and I've been burned by them more times than I want to admit). If anyone were to get VoIP right, I'm pretty sure they're not going to be AT&T.

Shouldn't an all IP telephony system be free, aside from what you pay for your internet access?

Yes, but a minimum of central management is still preferable (but on an IP network it doesn't have to be your ISP), has service like 911 require a central management (registered VoIP) or widespread standardization (localization device that communicate your localization to the emergency service when connecting to them).

When FiOS came to our neighborhood, those that signed up had the copper lines from the pole to their home ripped out. Perhaps opting out was possible, but the way the tech explained it was that the copper was now basically useless. I suppose if signing up for telephone only service from Verizon it goes through the fiber now, under a different set of rules?

There used to be a number of competing DSL providers that would offer service over the copper but it has been something around 10 years since deregulation made that option far less cost effective. If the telcos still had to let independent DSL providers access customer copper at the various central offices, at non-discriminatory rates, like it used to be, then those lines may have been useful. But what good are they in this environment?

DSL from an independent ISP is available here but the rates have shot way up since deregulation, I suppose because rent to access a customer line at the CO has shot up as a result. Maintaining copper lines involves more ongoing costs than fiber and with fewer and fewer people paying for it, so it could be argued that the rents should be high. To make matters worse, around here the bandwidth on the copper is also limited to 76.8K/710K up/down @ $220/month with an optimal location, less otherwise.

Soon there will be plenty of customers on the fiber side, and independent ISPs will be left behind with no way to access those customers. There should be some way for those ISPs to attach to the fiber under non-discriminatory rates. Whatever the cost is to deploy the fiber + maintenance over it's lifetime + plus a healthy margin, up to 35% maybe. If the telcos don't want to do this let in a new player in that is willing to follow these rules and set up centralized hubs for independents to attach.

It seems to make little sense to require each new independent ISP to run their own fiber to each premise. Costs would rise with the redundancy, being acutely high for new startups with fewer customers to spread the costs across. There is also only so much room on the poles/conduits for competing circuits and near impassable levels of political wrangling involved to bring cables into a municipality.

What would be the advantages of redundancy? Perhaps if some better fiber cable came to be, it might get deployed quicker by some clever startup, but that doesn't seem to be the case under the current regime. In a system without the redundancy it could be architected so customers could pay extra to have their individual fiber line to to the CO replaced early if an independent ISP co-locates equipment to support it. Most other customers could be upgraded on a long term contract after the existing line has been paid for including the above mentioned the healthy margin.

When FiOS came to our neighborhood, those that signed up had the copper lines from the pole to their home ripped out. Perhaps opting out was possible, but the way the tech explained it was that the copper was now basically useless. I suppose if signing up for telephone only service from Verizon it goes through the fiber now, under a different set of rules?

Oh you still pay the same ridiculous fees every month, whether it's copper or fiber. We have fios and got the "89.99 bundle" with tv, internet and landline. By the time you pay all the taxes, landline fees (FUSF, 911, et al), and equipment fees it's closer to $120.

Ugh, and that's before the cell phones...

My household will be dropping Verizon completely this year. No TV at all (waste of money), no landline, internet from Cox ($53/month for 15mb cable vs $75/month for 15mb FIOS), and probably cell service through T-mobile and we'll buy our own phones outright.

Well I have yet to hear a iPhone conversation of better quality than a Good PSTN / PRI...

I heard a friend make a mobile-to-mobile call on Orange UK recently. Both his and the recipient's handsets were Galaxy S3s and both were on Orange. The network supports "HD Voice" (G.722 to everyone else) which allows for 50 Hz to ~7 kHz audio bandwidth.

The difference was startling - he had his phone coming through his car's speakers with a wired connection and the tonal and timbral quality of the call was amazing by comparison to what the rest of us still put up with. I immediately wanted all phone calls to be G.722!

Because he hardly ever made phone calls to anyone except this person, he'd forgotten just how bad regular calls were. I made a quick call to him and he listened to the quality of my voice... And he winced.

Sadly that's the only time I've ever heard a G.722 codec mobile call made in the UK, the prerequisites - both caller and callee on Orange, both handsets supporting G.722 - is still too narrow to let this codec become the de facto codec choice for voice traffic in the UK. Hopefully it'll be widely adopted within the next 24 months.

danstl wrote:

I have found that while local calling quality is great VOIP it is so dependent on everything working well that unless At&t plans on upgrading their copper to provide GOOD IP services this is all just a joke... The great thing with a PRI is that you can loose some copper / channels and things will still work OK, yeah you may loose timing or something but call quality is hardly an issue. If you loose anything on a bonded circuit that is designed for your phone usage, your call quality immediately suffers, due to bandwidth issues.

I love voip, but At&t needs to get real, PSTN equipment is only part of their issue - they need to overhaul their entire phone network, this means replacing 20+ year old copper that is still all over the place... Not to mention the MILES and MILES of inline splices...

I set up the VoIP handsets at our office. They're on a very latency-stable dedicated ADSL2+ connection with interleaving disabled - the roundtrip time to and from our SIP centrex server is around 14 ms. Including audio conversion time and with judiciously set up outbound traffic QoS rules on our router (the connection is not enabled for end-to-end QoS), total RTT for the audio path is about 40 ms - very reasonable, and about half that of a mobile phone call.

We use the G.711u (uLaw) codec which is effectively uncompressed, as travels over the POTS and offers the least amount of latency due to encoding/decoding. Call quality surpasses many analogue POTS calls and unless we tell people we're calling over VoIP, they don't realise.

There's quite a few plug-and-play solutions already available but consumer-grade broadband as used by most residential homes just isn't up to snuff. Contention levels on these networks is at least 50:1 or higher and the QoS traffic policies don't sufficiently prioritise SIP or the phones' UDP traffic across the network. When it's all best-effort and you have P2P, HTTP and email traffic fighting for bandwidth with incredibly time-sensitive RTP voice packets you inevitably get the characteristic dropout and squelch as the phones struggle to keep up.

However, on a good network (and it doesn't have to be "business grade", it just has to be decent quality and well set up) VoIP easily outstrips telco phone call quality.

I still keep my corded phone plugged into my POTS line though, I know it'll always work when the power goes out. Love me some telco-supplied 50 V.

This is old news for me. I have a cell phone as my main phone and an old cell phone (no cell plan) using a SIP phone client as my home phone. AT&T can build out their own IP phone service but will anyone use it? There are plenty of alternatives.

BT is formerly British Telecom, but they changed their name to just "BT" a few years ago, so the article is actually correct there.

BT isn't British Telecom any more (just like BP isn't British Petroleum - I think their slogan now is "Beyond Petroleum"?); BT first came into life as the GPO and was operated by the (then nationalised) Post Office. It slowly became British Telecommunications Plc. Inevitably it was privatised; nowadays it's a multinational corporation with divisions throughout the world (they make a ton of cash from providing infrastructure and services in South Americas and Asia), see BT Group Plc and BT Global Services.

The "BT" in the UK is actually "BT Retail"; the copper network is managed by a company called BT Openreach after the forced split about a decade ago by our telco ombudsman Ofcom. ISPs pay Openreach monthly access fees for the copper loop, and they pay BT Wholesale for core network access and internet services -- IF they use BT's core network to provide service. They can implement their own LLU networks but then need to pay Openreach copper access rental fees *and* whatever other SMPF facilities rental / engineer service contracts are required, as only BT Openreach staff can ever enter exchanges (COs to the Yanks).

IP call quality does not equal copper wire call quality, in my experience.I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe. Currently, a standard landline phone will still work in a power outage, which can be critical in emergencies. Cell towers can go out and cell coverage is not universal, so they wouldn't fill in the gap.

The reason landlines stay up and running during many power issues is because most phone companies have battery back ups in neighborhood nodes and at central offices. So when main power drops, the batteries keep sending those 48V DC thru your phone lines to get the signal through.

I hope the future also includes many many many more homes running their own mini power stations from solar panels on the roofs. A subdivision or community could allocate a portion of that solar power output to keep the neighborhood internet node up and running. Someday IP telecom could be as reliable as landlines. Quite simple, if you ask me.

I think that there's a compromise available, and that it should involve government oversight for a transitional period of five to ten years. Copper POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) lines and equipment should remain in place, and be operational, at all municipal and major medical facilities. That would include schools and libraries (community!), hospitals, fire stations, police stations, and Dunkin' Donuts. (Okay, maybe not them.) Only voice services would be required, over two wires (four-wire has almost died anyway), and absolutely all other services could be dropped. Handsets would have to be (yes, make it a law) old-fashioned ones with mechanical or other unpowered ringers and dialing mechanisms (yes, such handsets still exist, and for good reason), with no external power sources required - or allowed. The copper network would not have to extend beyond the geographic or jurisdictional bounds of the given municipality, massively reducing the complexity of the networks, as no wide-range interconnect would be required.

This compromise would allow the telcos to immediately reclaim perhaps 90% or more of their CO space (less in some areas, more in others, up to 100% for purely residential COs), and strip their gear down to the simplest possible frameworks. At perhaps 66% or so of the way through the regulated transition period, maintenance of this "municipal voice network" could be deprioritized, in phases, with emergency services the last to go.

Now, I'm sure that AT&T and other major players (and the army of detractors that this idea may draw) will insist that it needs to be all or none. That need not be true, and we must resist that mindset. The hardware for such simplified and localized physical networks is already in place, though it has become more complicated than it needs to be - just leave it there where it exists, rotate in the simpler, POTS-only gear where required. It could all be simplified to a mind-boggling degree, with little to no hardware costs, though there would be some cost for reconfiguring the existing networks,

Didn't know people can reach 20khz or higher. I've tested myself with some test tones and found I can't hear anything over 17khz.

When I was a teenager I could hear the ultra-sonic 40kHz burglar alarm sensors used in a lot of banks and jewelry stores, very painful. I could also hear the 17kHz horizontal oscillator used in televisions. Not any more! Teenagers have been using "mosquito" tones as ringer tones. Usually the older teachers never caught on to them. Some of the real young teachers still had enough range to hear the tones and would nail the kids getting calls in class. My daughter thought it was lots of fun to tease me with it. So I just turned up The Who.

And another thing! [shakes cane.] You really, really don't want to remove the analog filtering from voice equipment attached to copper lines. Just because some whippersnapper can hear to 20KHz doesn't mean that the gear should support it. Do you really, really want to hear every pop and click, of which there may be hundreds per conversation? You're not hearing many of them now because of the filtering. And how about a wall of higher frequency noise, static and white noise, at high volume, that would make the worst and oldest magnetic tape recording hiss seem like the sounds of silence? I don't think so. Now, if you move the high end roll-off from 3900 Hz to, say 6 to 8 KHz, per a prior post here, well, that's better. Yes, voices get crisper. So what? But any higher and it becomes almost unusable, and even that compromise introduces a LOT of noise, depending on the area and more variables than we can really account for.

I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe. Currently, a standard landline phone will still work in a power outage, which can be critical in emergencies. Cell towers can go out and cell coverage is not universal, so they wouldn't fill in the gap.

I agree. On any given day, I can tell the IP calls versus the copper-line calls. The biggest issue seems to be the echo that comes from crappy equalization and phase control by the VOIP systems.

During hurricanes Ike and Alicia, I not only had continuous phone service but also DSL Internet access on copper. The cable company (Time-Warner) now Comcast failed within an hour of landfall so those poor souls with VOIP bundled with cable TV and ADSL got hosed. The cell phone system went next when the tower generators ran out of gas or LP. Of course the electrical systems went down and stayed down for 17 days. If AT&T screws their customers and gets rid of their battery banks, they'll be just as bad as the cable systems and not worth a damn thing.

To anyone who suffered through the interminable debates on circuit switching vs packet switching at the old Bell Labs, articles like this are sweet indeed. Good riddance to the old technology, and good riddance to the armies of Bell-shaped heads who kept it going for far too long.

As others have stated, since rolling out over the past 6 years or so, BT's (British Telecom's) core IP network known as 21CN (21st Century Network) has brought a lot of advantages to BT, and in quite a few ways to their customers and other providers that use BT's infrastructure.

It's worth pointing out that end users still have the copper cable to their premises with the POTS services that they had prior to 21CN. Phone calls are made in just the same way as they ever were.and there is no reason for call quality to be any different.

Employing 21CN has allowed BT to offer ADSL2+, VDSL2 etc. to subscribers in a much more straightforward and cost-effective manner to BT themselves than previously. To subscribers, this means that such services are now available and are reasonably affordable.

AT&T and I agree on one thing, the death of non-IP based home phone is inevitable. The part where we disagree is my opinion that the same is true of TV, mobile phone, and SMS, and the main roadblock is the telcos (and their love of using "fees" to hide the true price of services).

Sell me a reliable, dumb pipe and nothing more.

I don't want packages, bundles, and multiple services with multiple pricing structures that all amount to the exact same thing, ones and zeros being sent over copper, fiber, or radio wave. Fell free to use your existing expertise to offer tv/phone/messaging etc. services over that dumb pipe, but know that you will have to actually compete against others who are going to be far more innovative than you've ever shown yourselves to be.

Yeah, no. Until the telcos are required to provide fiber to the home, I won't be supporting any move to get rid of POTS. I have DirecTV at home, and outside of the fact that I'm happy with their service, they offer me NFL Sunday Ticket which I can't get through Time Warner, so I don't have a cable connection. The only other "high speed" Internet service available to me is Verizon DSL (and they have no current plans to make FIOS available in my area). Sure, I could do VoIP over DSL, but with my connection, I could have issues with VoIP when my kids are streaming cartoons over Netflix.

I also wonder what is planned to make phone service operational during a power outage/catastrophe. Currently, a standard landline phone will still work in a power outage, which can be critical in emergencies. Cell towers can go out and cell coverage is not universal, so they wouldn't fill in the gap.

A standard phone line that is fed directly from a central office may work during a power outage because the central office has back-up power in the form of a diesel generator. But that is not true of ALL central offices. Some very small and remote C.O.s don't have back-up power.

And a large share of standard POTS lines are provided by digital loop carrier systems. The remote terminals of those DLCs have limited back-up power in the form of batteries. There aren't enoug back-up generators in the country to back-up every remote switch, every DLC remote teriminal, and every cell tower.

You guys are all missing the point. They aren't necessarily talking about replacing your copper connection from your house to the CO, they want to get rid of all the old tandem and SS7 equipment at the CO and replace it with virtual switches and call managers. They'll still need to maintain the battery plants and all that stuff (although they might move them to a decentralized location and feed it with fiber), but instead of having a bunch of switchgear at a CO in your town, they'll have a fiber ring around the state and a 1/2 a rack of router in the back of the tech shop. All your calls will be routed through a mega-central office somewhere.

At one time phone over cable TV used centralized powering schemes to run phone equipment. The box on the side of the house was powered by the cable plant. The main difference was that it had a lot of electronics, where your average phone was more a mechanical device. As they switched it out to VoIP solutions most companies decided to integrate the voice circuits into a cablemodem instead of an outdoor, line powered solution. Hence the battery pack.

Also the experience during both Katrina and Sandy was that cellphones (and in particular SMS and data) were vastly more robust than PSTN networks where the low numbers of available circuits compared to residents was a serious bottleneck in people reaching help. The mobile network could be further improved by a simple mandate that wherever physically feasible all tower sites should have the same redundant 48 hour battery banks that have been required for CO's since forever.

The only "wireless" part of your wireless call (or data session) is from your phone to the nearest tower. After that, it's on a landline network for the vast majority of the call (or session). If the landline network goes down, sooner or later the wireless network will be affected also. The wireless network is not separate from the PSTN. It is part of the PSTN.

But I agree with you that we need standards for back-up power at cell sites. The FCC tried to implement such a rule after Katrina but it got shot down on a technicality. Even if the rule had gone through, the wireless industry was poised to appeal the rule in court.